Admin Response

Hello,
It's with great pleasure that we announce the availability of DigitalOcean Load Balancers, a fully managed, highly available service that you can deploy as easily as a Droplet. You can read the full announcement on our blog:
https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/load-balancers-simplifying-high-availability/
We still have many improvements planned for the product, stay tuned for updates soon, feel free to send us feedback.
Thanks,
The High Availability team at DigitalOcean

This is probably a minority opinion here, but I would like to discourage the implementation of this suggestion. Low-end droplets are so cheap that I think it would be better for customers to simply run their own load balancers (e.g. HAProxy or nginx) inside droplets. If DigitalOcean eventually supports publishing of custom from-scratch images, then perhaps a market of third-party, finely tuned load-balancing solutions for DigitalOcean could emerge.

What I've observed in my usage of AWS is that if the infrastructure provider provides a blessed solution for some higher level service such as MySQL hosting or load balancing, then there is strong pressure, at least in one's own mind, to use that solution even if it falls short of one's requirements or desires in some way. For example, AWS's Elastic Load Balancing only supports a few ports below 1024. Yet I use ELB at work because of the perception that ELB, being provided by Amazon, is probably better than anything I could cobble together or get from a third party.

DigitalOcean seems poised to be the premier provider of virtual machine hosting, in terms of performance and resilience as well as price. I think it would be best to do that one thing and do it well.

We agree with your point of view to some extent and it's really about assessing the needs of the customer base.

Definitely today there are some amazing applications that can do a lot of awesome things with some configurations and with very little load, specifically like nginx and load balancing.

We are going to be handling some of the larger issues first that are top of mind for us and as we continue to improve the core product we will investigate other value added services like load balancing and firewalls and see what we can introduce in that space.

Either way that will never prevent any customers from running their own load balanced setups or their own firewalls.

I agree with Matt Campbell. The higher your offerings go in the software stack, the more the customer requirements diverge. I can already imagine you'd waste much time bloating the load balancer features for fragmented customer requirements, in the end you end up having hundreds of configuration options that covers all http://wiki.nginx.org/Modules, while the same development effort could go into the core hosting features.

This is going to be "a marketing feature" - just because AWS or Linode has it, doesn't mean customers actually use it.

Whatever we release we like to stay basic with it for that reason, too many different requests and ultimately applications like nginx are so powerful and flexible that alot of the heavy lifting can be accomplished directly on the virtual server where you have full control.

I recently came across Digital ocean from some advertising on twitter. This feature (a very basic TCP LB) and a private back end network are the only things prevent me from moving numerous linodes to Digital Ocean. You guys rock

Hi, what exactly does it mean "we are in the process of a large roll-out that's under wraps but we will be announcing it soon."? Next week? Next month? Next year? It's more than a year since you wrote that you're looking at load balancing options...

DigitalOcean provides great little nodes at a very good price, which suits our plans for a horizontally scaling product very well. Load balancing is the real sticking point as we would need to manage those also and ensure high availability.

I'm in the same boat as a lot of people... I'm looking to move our servers from AWS into DO. I'm happy to deploy HAProxy on a small droplet to deal with the load balancing, so I fall into the 'keep it simple' side of the discussion. The key factors to help me along would be a private IP pool or a VPC, as discussed elsewhere. This would also mean that I don't need to tie-up valuable IPV4 addresses), no charges for internal traffic and having all my data transfer pooled in the account.

Another big win here. Rackspace has cloud load balancers and Amazon Route 53. In order to truly compete in a sense of being a viable option for scaling...This is an absolute must. Otherwise, you're just going to be relegated to the smaller types of hosting needs. ... Not because we can't use another service like Route 53 or even setup HAProxy on two Digital Ocean servers ourselves for failover...But because it's a pain in the arse and it's 2013. Screwing around with load balancers is really not something we want to be doing.